Well,
here we all are again, those same rubicund
faces glowing ruddily, those same cut – glass
accents piercing the frosty air: it’s the
December version of Our Religious Duty, of
which the Easter one is attending the Bach
Choir’s ‘Matthew Passion:’ yea verily I say
unto you, that ye shall be saved if ye canst
sit through these two ‘services’ each year
in my name. No penance to do so in the present
case, however: this concluding concert in
a strong series comprising most of the usual
suspects, was as fresh and stimulating as
one has by now come to expect from Polyphony
and its director – despite the aura of self-satisfaction
at having done one’s duty pervading the hall.
Each
time I hear this group perform this work,
the interpretation is different: last year’s
was striking by way of its novel matching
of singer and aria, and above all for its
positively lugubrious pace. This year, the
assignment of arias was more conventional,
and the tempo was brisk enough for me to wonder
(shameless self –flattery, of course) if the
conductor had actually read and heeded my
remarks about the somewhat turgid 2002 performance.
The overture was as sprightly as one could
hope to hear, and even the Pastoral Symphony
was lively rather than languid. This pacing
has, of course, a marked effect on the soloists
who do not have to work quite as hard as they
would need to do if the work were being presented
as though it were a Passion.
James
Gilchrist is a stalwart of these performances:
he is, of course, represented by Hazard Chase
(as are Emma Kirkby and Stephen Layton) so
one could hardly expect any other tenor to
replace him in this context: he’s not exactly
my ideal of a Handelian tenor, since his tone
is on the dry side and his management of the
florid passages is no more than acceptable,
but he did sing ‘Comfort Ye’ quite beautifully,
shaping the phrases elegantly and with more
than his customary sweetness of tone. He’s
clearly a very musical and committed singer
but his rendition of such lines as ‘Thou shalt
dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel’
is pleasing rather than dazzling, since he
does not have quite enough agility in the
technique or theatricality in the presentation
to really excite the hearer. His best singing,
apart from ‘Comfort Ye,’ was in the duet ‘O
death, where is thy sting?’ where his voice
blended finely with that of the counter-tenor.
William
Towers made quite an impression on me in his
ROH debut a few months ago in ‘Orlando’ when
he took the part of Medoro at short notice,
standing in for Bejun Mehta who in turn had
replaced Alice Coote. Towers has a meltingly
lovely voice, piercingly sweet and beautifully
placed, but I would call him a sopranist rather
than a counter-tenor, since his tone is very
close to that of a soprano and resembles not
at all that of singers such as Michael Chance
and Andreas Scholl. This of course has an
effect on the balance of a performance, since
it seemed at times here that we had two sopranos:
however, to my ears a higher voice is preferable
to a plummy one in this music. ‘But who may
abide’ was finely done, with the rapid passagework
on ‘refiner’s fire’ accurately if a little
tentatively presented, and ‘He was despised’
was one of the high points of the evening,
lovely in both tone and phrasing.
Emma
Kirkby is so well known to London audiences
by now that one hardly needs to preface any
remarks about her singing: you either love
or hate that rather bloodless sound and that
almost vibrato-less production, and I love
it in such small doses as one gets in ‘Messiah.’
She sang ‘Rejoice greatly’ (for once taken
as the minuet it’s meant to be) with the proper
sense of joy, and her ‘How beautiful are the
feet’ was smoothly and confidently performed.
James
Rutherford is another young singer who has
impressed me in the opera house, in his case
as the bass soloist in the ENO staged version
of the ‘St John Passion.’ On this occasion,
he was a little muted in approach, as though
he were holding back because of a cold, but
this is clearly a weighty voice, with a sound
technique to support it and a powerful intelligence
to inform it. ‘Thus saith the Lord’ was appropriately
commanding, with incisive treatment of ‘…the
messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight
in:’ and ‘The people that walked in darkness’
was sung with dramatic skill. His arias in
the later parts were less successful, possibly
through tiredness, since he is still relatively
inexperienced: nevertheless he is a singer
of great promise who will surely one day give
us a ‘trumpet shall sound’ to be reckoned
with.
Those
trumpets sounded better than ever this year,
‘silver’ but certainly not ‘snarling,’ and
the booming organ provided exactly the right
sense of confident display at the closing
moments of the work: continuo was as sparkling
as ever, strings as beautifully mellifluous,
and of course the choral singing approached
perfection, what Shaw called the ideal of
‘unembarrassed sincerity of dramatic expression’
being evident in every phrase. Oh well – I’ll
just have to hear it all again next year.
Melanie Eskenazi
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